Mind Management
Something new and big is happening in our lives. It affects our well-being, relationships, jobs, employment and business success. It can radically change us for the better. It can help fix those problems buried inside of us, where we hide our deep-rooted emotions – the ones that we don’t want the world to know.
The cause of the problem is our mindset, or put another way – it’s the way our brain has been hardwired. Our mindset is the lens through which our thoughts and actions are delivered. So where did it all begin? Our mindset was formed during our childhood.
As toddlers we had a growth mindset of perpetual learning. We enjoyed learning by playing, running, falling down, painting and talking. Making lots of mistakes was fun and the best way to learn. Infant school continued this enjoyable period and re-enforced our growth mindset. Everyone loves a toddler, and nurturing the growth mindset came second nature to parents. So far, so good!
Then came secondary education, and gradually our growth mindset changed for the worse into a fixed mindset. Why? Immoveable deadlines became the norm, homework took away our fun, exams had to be passed and mistakes could not be tolerated. It was no longer enjoyable and we were being criticised and judged constantly. We had to learn at the speed of the system and had to study subjects for which we had no interest. The education system was responsible for the way we are trained, coached and developed.
Sir Ken Robinson says our education system was designed for University Professors. If you do very well in all exams you will surpass ‘A’ levels, gain a first-class honours degree followed by a PhD and finally achieve a Professorship. Unfortunately, the vast majority of us never make it to this academic pinnacle, leaving our egos bruised and resulting in a fixed mindset.
Parenting mimics the education system. Strict rules, criticism and judgement killed the fun and even when we praise our children for being intelligent, we innocently re-enforced the fixed mindset. Employment had even stricter rules, judgements and criticism and mistakes were intolerable. So we hid them, and bluffed our way through life. The fixed mindset saps our confidence, makes us defensive and hides mistakes. The deep fear we feel is that we are not good enough and have to hide our shortcomings.
People with a fixed mindset are less happy, less successful and less fulfilled than those with a growth mindset. Most mindset research in this millennium has been led by Prof C. Dweck, and the exciting news is that it is relatively easy to change from a fixed to a growth mindset. But how? The starting point is awareness.
Here is a quote from one of her workshops:
Many people think of the brain as a mystery. They don’t know much about intelligence and how it works. Most people think that they are born smart, average or dumb and stay that way for life. But new research shows that the brain is more like a muscle – it changes and gets stronger the more you use it. Scientists have shown how the brain grows and gets stronger when you learn.
When you learn new things, tiny connections in the brain multiply and get stronger. The more you challenge your mind, the stronger they get. Then, things that you once found hard, become easy and second nature.
Nobody laughs at babies and say how dumb they are because they cannot talk. They just haven’t learned yet.
So, what proportion of the population has a fixed mindset? Everyone is a mix of fixed and growth mindsets and a 'pure' growth or ‘fixed’ mindset split doesn't exist. There's no research about the percentage of people who have growth or fixed mindsets and so far, there’s no validated way to measure either of those states. However, Professor Dweck says 40% of students have a fixed mindset
So, what has this to do with access2growth?
We are a management consultancy specialising in management development. We have been around for 26 years, had over 150 clients in every industry sector and had amazing successes as a direct result of our support. Our USP was that we combined management development with best practice. Factories had to implement Lean (best practice), and we did this by getting managers to become better at management, to free up their time and implement Lean themselves.
However, what we seldom mention is our failures. Quite a number of clients did not achieve their goals. We at access2growth studied these failures passionately and the more we studied, the more we learned, and the more changes we made to our programmes. In 2020 in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic we realised something big: unknown to us at the time, success had occurred because we had changed the mindset of the leaders that we had developed. Moreover, for those leaders that had failed, we had not been able to change their fixed mindset.
As a result, what do we do differently? We educate, train and develop our leaders to consciously change mindsets. As a simple example: making mistakes is OK, so long as you learn from them and will improve as a result.
If you would like to find out more. Why not contact us on info@access2growth.com?
